Everyday Beans Podcast - Mostly About Coffee and Other Stuff

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In this episode, I walk through a water chemistry experiment I ran on a light roast Kenyan coffee I roasted myself. For a long time, I've been playing this game of trying to coax sweetness out of light roast by pulling every lever available. I've swapped brewers, played with paper filters, dialed down temperature, and manipulated water chemistry. This time, I took it further. I tested three water profiles side by side on the same coffee: distilled, acidic, and a sweet-profile build. The distilled version was flat and unremarkable. The acidic version was lively, expressive, and the one I couldn't stop going back to. The sweet profile worked almost too well. Chocolatey, sweet, and completely stripped of everything that made the coffee interesting. The acidity was gone. The personality was gone. I realized I'd gone too far, and that realization opened up a bigger question about what we're actually doing when we manipulate coffee.
The deeper conversation in this episode is about losing sight of the coffee itself in the middle of all the tools, gear, and variables we use. I'm talking about the moment when the experimentation stops being in service of the coffee and starts being about winning an argument with it. By listening to this episode, you'll hear how one experiment shifted the way I think about light roast and why I'm starting to believe the acidity was never the problem to fix. You'll also come away with a genuine question to sit with the next time you brew: are you working with the coffee, or are you trying to change what it fundamentally is?
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For good tasty coffee, check us out at: everydaybeans.com

For tips, tricks and still trying to figure it out: https://www.youtube.com/@everyday-beans

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I bought another brewer. I saw people talking about the Pulsar Mini dripper online, felt the pull of missing out on something, and ordered it. It sat in the box for a couple of days while I waited for the right moment to open it. Then I did what I always do. I studied the construction, refused to read the directions, brewed a Honduras I already know well, and tasted it. It tasted like my V60. A little less roundness in the middle, which is typical for me with immersion brews. And then I set it down. In this episode I walk through that whole loop honestly, and I ask the question underneath it. Is that the goal?
What you will learn here is why coffee gear so often ends up as an ornament on the shelf, and what you are actually buying when you buy it. The coffee does not care how you brew it. It is what it is. So the real product is not the flavor unlock the marketing promised, it is the comparison, the noticing, the deconstruction. I make the case that you can get all of that from one brewer you have truly mastered, quirks and weaknesses included. I also make the case that if you want to keep buying, that is fine too, as long as you know why. This is about coffee gear FOMO, mastering a single pour over dripper, and being honest about what a piece of equipment does for you versus what you think it does for you.
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For good tasty coffee, check us out at: everydaybeans.com

For tips, tricks and still trying to figure it out: https://www.youtube.com/@everyday-beans

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In this episode, I dig into the one variable in coffee that almost nobody accounts for: ourselves. I've spent the past couple of weeks drinking a Costa Rican natural and a Kenyan light roast, and no matter how I roasted them or brewed them, they just weren't doing it for me. Instead of blaming the coffee, the water, or the brewer, I started asking a harder question. What if the coffee didn't change? What if I did? I walk through my own palate journey, from drinking light roasts on a bad grinder with tap water, to chasing bright acidity and in-your-face fruit, to where I am now, fond of medium and dark roasts and chasing sweetness over acidity.
I use the boiled Brussels sprouts you hated as a kid and love as an adult to explain why your taste evolves whether you notice it or not. I talk about how easy it is to see change across twenty years but how blind we are to it across a single year. By the end, you'll understand why your favorite coffee can quietly stop working, why that is not a bad thing, and how to identify whether your shifting preferences are about the cup or about you. If you've ever wondered why a coffee you loved suddenly falls flat, this episode gives you a framework for figuring out what actually changed.
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For good tasty coffee, check us out at: everydaybeans.com

For tips, tricks and still trying to figure it out: https://www.youtube.com/@everyday-beans

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In this episode, I take you inside one of the most misunderstood variables in specialty coffee: water. I open up about my journey from tap water skeptic to someone actively building my own water chemistry from scratch, and why that evolution was not only inevitable but necessary. I talk about how I stumbled back into Third Wave Water after finding a forgotten package in the back of a shelf, how it immediately changed what I was tasting, and why, after more than a year of using it, I started noticing that every cup was beginning to taste a little too similar. I share what that observation triggered in me, and why 163 PPM felt too heavy for the kind of clarity and sweetness I was chasing.
I also walk through why I decided to move away from pre-packaged water mineral profiles and start building my own, using a target of around 100 PPM and a philosophy organized around two profiles: sweetness and acidity. Rather than matching water to roast level, I believe the coffee itself should tell you what it needs, and I want the control to actually respond to that. By listening to this episode, you'll understand why water is not just a background variable but one of the most powerful tools in your brewing process, and you'll start thinking about what your own water choices are actually doing to your cup.
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For good tasty coffee, check us out at: everydaybeans.com

For tips, tricks and still trying to figure it out: https://www.youtube.com/@everyday-beans

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A coffee recipe is really just a stack of small decisions, and after years of brewing I have stopped pretending they all carry the same weight. In this episode I rank the brewing variables that actually earn their place in my routine, from the two I treat as non-negotiable down to the ones I now hold loosely. I walk through why water sits at the very top for me, how I use an "in between" mineral profile that blends an acidity build and a sweetness build, and the simple dilution trick I use with packet water to bring my PPM down into a range that lets the coffee speak instead of the minerals. I also explain why I keep blooming my coffee even though I cannot tell you the full science behind it, and why "it works, so I do it" is an honest enough answer for a home brewer.
From there I get into ratio, drawdown, temperature, and grind size, and where each one landed on my list. You will learn why I gave up being a strict 1:15 person once I met coffees that came alive at 1:10, how I read drawdown as information rather than a target to hit, why I recommend changing water temperature in five or ten degree jumps instead of tiny increments, and how to find your grind size range and then stop fiddling with it. If you have been trying to control every variable at once, this is a practical case for protecting a few decisions and letting the rest stay flexible. And there is one thing I never ranked at all, which might be the most interesting part.
Support the show
For good tasty coffee, check us out at: everydaybeans.com

For tips, tricks and still trying to figure it out: https://www.youtube.com/@everyday-beans